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26 results

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  • Chapter 8 - ‘Angels … Recognize Our Innocence’

  • Edited by Alexandra Lewis, University of Aberdeen
  • Book:
    The Brontës and the Idea of the Human
    Published online:
    22 May 2019
    Print publication:
    16 May 2019, pp 167-188

  • Summary

    Jan-Melissa Schramm considers the extent to which Anne, Charlotte and Emily Brontës’ ideas of the human depend upon, and differ from, legal and theological ideas of ‘rights’ before the law and ‘creatureliness’ before God. Providing a detailed examination of the submissive self in Victorian Evangelical theology; Romantic autobiography and the language of experience; and nascent formulations of human rights frameworks, Schramm moves to a close reading of Jane Eyre, including an analysis of religious (William Ellery Channing) as opposed to later secular (Samuel Smiles) self-culture in Jane’s ethical education. Anne and Charlotte Brontës’ inclusion of Biblical quotation both worked to underpin trajectories of female empowerment and helped to create a more liberal sense of Biblical meaning. As Schramm attests, the sense of equality of all before God had to be established in the public sphere before legal recognition could follow. The Brontës’ complex ideas of the human, combining reason, the heart and Christian humility, serve for Schramm as a case-study of the extent to which modern ideas of autonomy might be successfully grafted onto self-abnegation before God: and Jane Eyre, Shirley, Agnes Grey, Wuthering Heights, Villette and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall all play a part in this process.

Atonement and Self-Sacrifice in Nineteenth-Century Narrative
  • Jan-Melissa Schramm
  • Published online:
    05 July 2012
    Print publication:
    21 June 2012
  • Jan-Melissa Schramm explores the conflicted attitude of the Victorian novel to sacrifice, and the act of substitution on which it depends. The Christian idea of redemption celebrated the suffering of the innocent: to embrace a life of metaphorical self-sacrifice was to follow in the footsteps of Christ's literal Passion. Moreover, the ethical agenda of fiction relied on the expansion of sympathy which imaginative substitution was seen to encourage. But Victorian criminal law sought to calibrate punishment and culpability as it repudiated archaic models of sacrifice that scapegoated the innocent. The tension between these models is registered creatively in the fiction of novelists such as Dickens, Gaskell and Eliot, at a time when acts of Chartist protest, national sacrifices made during the Crimean War, and the extension of the franchise combined to call into question what it means for one man to 'stand for', and perhaps even 'die for', another.

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